This Friday, May 2, Martha Nussbaum, an extraordinary lecturer and author, will present a lecture at the University of Dayton. The lecture is open to the public; it is scheduled to begin at 7:30 PM and will be held in the Matt Heck courtroom in the Keller School of Law Building on UD’s campus. The lecture is sponsored by Dayton’s Council of World Affairs.
According to Wikepedia, Dr. Nussbaum, “is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown where she held the rank of university professor. … In September 2005 Nussbaum was listed among the world’s Top 100 intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines…. She is the author of many books, including Poetic Justice, Love’s Knowledge, and The Fragility of Goodness.”
Dr. Nussbaum’s lecture will focus on the topics of her latest book, “The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.” Here is what the Harvard Review of Books says about the “Clash Within”:
“While America is focused on religious militancy and terrorism in the Middle East, democracy has been under siege from religious extremism in another critical part of the world. As Martha Nussbaum reveals in this penetrating look at India today, the forces of the Hindu right pose a disturbing threat to its democratic traditions and secular state. …
“The Hindu right seeks to return to a “pure” India, unsullied by alien polluters of other faiths, yet the BJP’s defeat in recent elections demonstrates the power that India’s pluralism continues to wield. The future, however, is far from secure, and Hindu extremism and exclusivity remain a troubling obstacle to harmony in South Asia.
“Nussbaum’s long-standing professional relationship with India makes her an excellent guide to its recent history. Ultimately she argues that the greatest threat comes not from a clash between civilizations, as some believe, but from a clash within each of us, as we oscillate between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others. India’s story is a cautionary political tale for all democratic states striving to act responsibly in an increasingly dangerous world.”
An excerpt from the book:
The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a critical examination of the influential thesis of the “clash of civilizations,” made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His picture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and an aggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today’s India, where, I shallargue, the violent values of the Hindu right are imports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the third-largest Muslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens, despite severe poverty and other inequalities.
This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which is also torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows the country as good and pure, its enemies as an external “axis of evil.” The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows America as complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control and hierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I’ve called the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans to themselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect and aggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination. Americans have a great deal to gain by learning more about India and pondering the ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such as Sir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose ruminations about nationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent to today’s conflicts.
